And...

Writing About Film

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (Nicholas Meyer, 1991)

Unpublished, 1992

Readers are all too aware of the dearth of healthy, subversive Hollywood
entertainment. Despite the industry's liberal platitudes, mainstream cinema
inevitably works in one way or another to feed corporate greed and/or maintain
the sociopolitical status quo. It's not often that progressives can enter
a theater with hope of bona fide guilt-free entertainment. Well, I'm here
to tell you that Star Trek VI does a pretty good job, meriting this
glowing review a full seven weeks after its premiere.

The Star Trek package may be
easy to dismiss because of the bell-bottoms, funny haircuts, and campy star-hopping
escapades, but Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, the latest
installment in this longest of all series, is expertly paced, often darkly
thrilling and suffused with
the beloved tongue-in-cheek humor of the old TV show. Along the way, Star
Trek VI
attempts, with minimal sentimentality, to re-introduce the simple, oft-forgotten
values of peace, friendship, and trust. Best of all, the film subverts its
cold war premise — Us vs. Them, Federation vs. Klingons — and
transforms a hated alien race into a complex, sympathetic culture. And where
else than
on the Enterprise will we ever see senior citizens bounding about
like Arnold Schwarzenegger? Believe it or not, Star Trek VI could
become an artifact which will be remembered by later generations as a poetic
allegory of our
times:
the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the foundations for world peace.
Peace — or a partnership of bullies with the power to control the universe's
fate? This film gives even that troubling scenario consideration — leaving
the morality of superpower politics unchallenged — and just as we don't
yet know our fate, remains ambiguous about its universe's as well.

Star Trek VI is an archetypal fable; "universal" enough
for anybody, yet specific enough to form a personal connection with any contemporary
viewer. This film refers as much to actual politics — people's lives — as,
say, Oliver Stone's JFK, the polemical product du jour. And, because it alludes
to contemporary events, and not those of nigh-on thirty years ago, Star
Trek VI may be more resonant.

Star Trek VI is directed by Nicholas Meyer (of Star
Trek II: The Wrath of Khan fame), from a story by Leonard Nimoy and
Meyer & Denny
Martin Flinn. (Note that "and" and "&"; they must
mean something.) Once again, the Enterprise's beloved bridge crew
returns: William Shatner
(Kirk), Nimoy (Spock), DeForest Kelley (Dr. McCoy), Walter Koenig (Chekov),
George Takai (Sulu), Nichelle Nichols (Uhura), and James Doohan (Scotty).
At this point, Star Trek's characters are familiar to three generations,
as well-rounded as any but one's closest friends or relatives. Serial television
allows viewers hours of access into characters' lives, giving their personalities,
and the actors in the roles, room to flesh themselves out; and, combined
with time's actual passage and the fact that Star Trek endured three
years of first-run TV, twenty years of reruns, and eleven years of film adventures,
these characters truly are family — if you'll have them. Somehow, the
characters' familiarity lends the film validity, as if everything — the
show, the previous five movies — led to this historic denouement.

The film opens with the Klingon
empire disintegrating. An energy projection station on a Klingon's moon has
exploded — an
obvious allusion to the U.S.S.R.'s Chernobyl meltdown — leaving
the Klingons mostly powerless and their home planet's atmosphere poisoned.
The Federation guesses that the Klingons have roughly fifty years before
the planet becomes uninhabitable. The Klingons are a bloated, corrupt state,
and can finally guarantee peace only because they can no longer afford war.
With the encouragement of Sarek, the Vulcan ambassador (and, coincidentally,
Spock's father), Klingon Chancellor Gorkon proposes a peace conference with
the Federation. Kirk and the Enterprise crew, only three months
from retirement, are chosen to serve as the first olive branch between these
two suspicious
empires, and must escort the Klingons to Earth.

Chancellor Gorkon (excellently
portrayed by David Warner), a Twenty-Fourth Century Mikhail Gorbachev, is
his race's lone visionary, and he sees an open
window for true peace. However, a diabolical plot is soon brought to bear,
and in a scene of intense power and masterful filmmaking, Gorkon is betrayed
and assassinated. The attack is carried out so that it seems as if the Enterprise
fired upon the Klingon ship, and Kirk and Dr. McCoy, strictly through circumstance,
are framed for the crime. Interstellar diplomacy is maintained only via the
almighty bureaucracy, and despite the protestations of the Lincolnesque
but ultimately helpless Federation president, the accused are brought before
a Klingon kangaroo court. Scripters Nimoy, Meyer & Flinn work all sorts
of tricks, as the trial becomes for all intents a recreation of the historic
Cuban missile U.N. showdown between Adlai Stevenson and Soviet Minister for
Foreign Affairs Andrei Gromyko, This time, however, the tables are turned,
as the Klingon D.A. demands that Kirk answer his challenge without waiting
for the translation. This
powerful scene leaves the viewer in awe of the savage beauty of the Klingon
culture, as Kirk and McCoy struggle to defend themselves at the bottom of
a well of alienation and chaos. The accused are promptly found guilty and
are sentenced to hard labor on a frozen asteroid archipelago.

While Kirk
and McCoy founder about, it becomes clear that the assassination was conceived
and executed by those whose existence depends upon the continuation
of the cold war. The martyred Gorkon, who evolves into an idealistic amalgam
of Gorbachev and John Kennedy, was "soft on the Federation," and
various human, Klingon, Vulcan, and Romulan agents took care to end his career
before he could end theirs. Klingon conspirators, especially the pontificating
mastermind General Chang (Christopher Plummer), desperately hoping to pillage
Federation planets of the vital materials, use the assassination to pressure
Gorkon's successor, his daughter Azetbur (Rosanna DeSoto), to bring full-scale
war to the Federation. The military-industrial complex functions smoothly
in all
eras, and the suggestion of a conspiracy precipitating President Kennedy's
assassination is more tantalizingly laid out here than in Stone's overwrought
thriller. Similarly, the film postulates upon conspiracy theories in broader
terms, welcoming analysis of earlier failed periods of détente between
the U.S. and U.S.S.R. The threatened thwarting of Star Trek VI's
promise of peace — and history's true lost opportunities — are
the specters which hang over the film.

Needless to say, the plot is soon uncovered, and various adventures
reunite the Enterprise crew as they race against time to prevent
the precarious détente
which remains from being irrevocably lost. Our heroes battle more than just
the dastardly agents who killed the visionary leader and framed them for
the
crime: they must also combat the prejudices of generations of hatred and
the stultifying cobwebs of galactic cold war.

Trust — bandied about, abused,
but too infrequently explored in contemporary film — is Star Trek
VI's archetype.
As the film deconstructs trust, it redefines
it: between friends, lovers, family and, most difficult of all, states.
In the cold war Star Trek universe, the Klingons are the ultimate
enemy, more
hateful than even the real-life Russians. Left, right and center, all could
detest the warmongering, hateful, dirty Klingons. Until now. The film manages,
in two hours time, to wash those years of propaganda away. Despite Gorkon's
assassination causing the very worst of times between the two sides, Kirk
must find room for trust, and Azetbur, the Chancellor's daughter, becomes
the film's beacon of righteousness. The hatred Kirk feels toward the Klingons — cemented
by the death of his son at their hands (in Star Trek III) — is
tangible and understandable; in its humanity, its blind need for revenge,
its defiance
of reason and common sense. And as Kirk begins to see through his hatred,
we see possibility as well.

At the dinner table the night before the Chancellor's
murder, Gorkon's party and the Enterprise crew dine together in
frosty petulance, Chekov attempts to shame the Klingons with lofty talk about "inalienable
human rights." Instead, Azetbur shames him and the other humans, pointing
out his ethnocentrism: "''Inalienable'?" she says, "If
only you could hear yourselves. 'Human' rights? Even the term is racist.
The Federation
is a 'homo sapiens only' club." Powerful words and concepts for an adventure
film, and the fact that they are directed at Chekov, the Russian, only makes
them the more so. In the Twenty-Fourth Century, Russians may no longer be
aliens and humans may have overcome their need to oppress one another, but
racism and xenophobia clearly are homo sapien traits, not merely
Western ones. Liberalism is conceptually rooted in an elitist ideal of who
qualifies
as "human," a
paradigm which assuredly excludes true aliens like Klingons (and possibly
— Spock may wonder — Vulcans as well).

The dinner brings other lessons, as
Trekkies, maybe for the first time, behold the Klingons unburdened by the
curtain of fear. They are an ancient, tragic,
even beautiful, race — and are certainly endangered. Brigadier Kerla,
Gorkon's loyal chief military advisor, says, "You hypocritically assume
your democratic system gives you a moral prerogative to force other cultures
to
conform to your politics. We know where this is leading: the annihilation
of our culture. Klingons will replace those on the lowest rung of the Federation
ladder." Paleo-con McCoy offers the classic capitalist excuse — "that's
economics, not racism" — before Uhura, recognizing racism, cuts
him off. It is a powerful exchange and frames the film's themes.

As trust works to
grow against such overwhelming odds, Star Trek VI glimpses its struggles
elsewhere. The viewer learns to appreciate the hazards on this
journey to understanding. Azetbur must trust her father's vision and refuse
to bow to the warmongers in her camp. Similarly, Vulcan Lieutenant Valeris
wrestles with either trusting Spock's peaceful intuitions or her cultural
and military indoctrination. And Kirk, of course, has lessons to learn as
well. While marooned, he is seduced by Martia, a shapeshifter who often looks
like the African model Iman but in her natural manifestation is decidedly "male" in
appearance. This realization throws Kirk for the proverbial loop, but one
suspects he learns a little, about constructed ideals of sexuality and judging
people by their appearances.

A leap is called for, and the only ones who have
made it as the film opens are Gorkon and Spock, who accomplish it due to
faith in the principles of
peace. Trust me, as well, not to reveal Star Trek VI's conclusion,
or even if there remains a peace to be salvaged. Trust instead my assurance
that the movie's conclusion is both dramatically and emotionally satisfying,
and
that
the
film emerges
above all as one of the superior entertainments of the cinematic season.

In a
time of upheaval and possibility — and fear — Star Trek VI is
about hope and comraderie, and most of all, trust. No radical manifesto,
to be sure,
but the film embraces true progressive convictions. It may be idealistic — about
a universe which doesn't exist, whose problems can be perfectly resolved — but
it tenders a vision which everyone should hold: peace and understanding,
cliches which need periodical reexamination so as to more tightly grasp their
fundamental concepts. The Klingons are the ultimate Other: signifying American
Indians, blacks, women, Russians, or whatever bugbear Western history's long
reign has found convenient. Star Trek VI performs the consummate
postmodern political maneuver, stripping the Other of its strangeness and
revealing
one's own face beneath. It is a powerful idea and is brought to mostly successful
fruition. Anyone who leaves the theater still hating all Klingons is a very
dangerous person indeed.

Kirk's closing comments, "Once again we've
saved civilization as we know it," however true, is a poke at his own
ostentatiousness. Emerging from forty-plus years of nuclear terror, maybe
we the viewers can appreciate its resonance. Whether Star Trek VI can
inspire new attitudes is not as relevant a question now, post-Soviet Union,
but the
film's ideals
apply to all continuing struggles. Removed from the rhetoric about "evil
empires" and "better dead than red," the black and white fades
to grey, and movies can't help us there. Nonetheless, I found the film uplifting
and was imbued with a radical sense of possibility. If I could toss one film
into a time capsule, I couldn't think of one which more poetically touches
upon contemporary fears and hopes about where history is leading.

By Star Trek VI's conclusion, our heroes have learned a number of lessons
about trust and understanding, and when it's time for independent thought,
for
seeing
beyond rules and hierarchies to a greater possibility. As the credits come
up, the Enterprise soars off one last time, but now to where "no one has gone before." Go off and see this film before it disappears into
the sunset as well.